I offer a couch to those who need to crash in a different country for a while.

To my friends here in the US:

I don’t pretend to entirely understand what just happened in the UK. For that, I’d point you toward Charlie Stross and Lee Harris, who both wrote on Brexit today. I do get the general sense that we are looking at a situation where bloviating dickheads used bluster and lies to dominate media cycles in order to spread easy-to-swallow misinformation and lead the country toward a nasty disentanglement from the EU — which has already kicked the UK economy right in the spotted dick. At present, I’m told the British pound is worth less than a foil-covered chocolate coin. You’d need a sack of them just to start a game of Galaga.

And the wind blowing from London right now is like a threat over all of us — a song of prophecy and rot carried on the growing breeze. We have our own bloviators here, and of course we have King Bloviator himself, Donald Trump the Drumpflord, who says little and lies a lot and knows next to nothing and it matters little. He continues to do his smug yelly-smelly thing where he bleats whatever he has to bleat in order to convince us to reclaim our identity as AMERICA, as if our national identity is something he can control or claim for himself. MAKE AMERICA GREAT. BRITAIN FIRST. DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE.

Trump is of course an attention-seeking, tantrum-throwing human one-star-Yelp-review who has less devotion to truth and sanity than your average Kindergartener. And we think, ah ha ha, he can’t win. He can’t. He’s just too absurd. It’s a show — a shit-show, admittedly, but it’s all a con, a reality program, a donkeyfucking performance of the lowest order, and soon he’ll bow out or poop the bed or run out of money and that’ll be that. And yet, he clings like a tick. So many of his businesses have failed he should no longer be allowed to run a single business, and yet, he does. He shouldn’t have won the primaries, and yet, he did. Warnings upon warnings come our way. Darkness crawls from Mordor. Long shadows cast by the black gaze of Sauron himself. The orcs are on the March. The world shudders.

You get a media more interested in entertainment and controversy than in news.

You get politicians who come in and dominate that format — because they are better at the circus.

You get xenophobes and fear-mongers working off one another.

You get people willing to vote against stability, fed on the fantasy that they will somehow get to reclaim their country and keep the enemies at the gate all while creating a REVOLUTION.

Never mind that it’s a lie.

It’s an illusion — or a delusion — ginned up by people who are very good at telling you exactly what you want to hear and have no interest in telling you what you need to hear.

What I’m saying is: America, get your head on straight, and while you’re at it, screw it on real tight. It’s going to be a long and stupid election cycle. Longer and stupider than it’s already been. Turbulence is ahead but we must not let Donald Trump take the White House. Better yet, we need to vote out the obstructionists in Congress who have no interest in compromise and every interest in ideological posturing. Vote. Vote! Yes, yes, blah blah blah, lesser of two evils. Listen, first, I don’t agree that we’re in that situation — I like and support Hillary Clinton, I’m glad she’s our nominee, and I think she’ll do a dutiful and crafty job as president. But at this point, even if you think this is a contest of two lesser evils — well, I’d submit that a punch to the gut is better than BEING REPEATEDLY DUNKED IN A TANK OF ANGRY, SPHINCTER-SEEKING SCORPIONS. Before voting for Donald Trump I would vote for a mason jar decorated with googly eyes and filled to the brim with my own urine.

Vote. And it’s not just you that needs to vote, is it? Drag everyone you know to vote. Demand participation in this democracy of ours. Trump’s people? They’re gonna vote. They’re invested. They bought their tickets to the circus. You need to vote, too. Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Keep America from trickling down through the sewer grate.

Vote this election.

Vote next election.

Vote, vote, vote, vote, VOTE.

And do not vote for Donald Trump. Unless you want to tank our economy. Unless you want the Orc Horde of Mordor to run rampant over the country you claim should be ‘great’ again.

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You want Trump? THIS is how you get Trump: create a very middle class society. Make all of the values of society very middle class. Create an economy where only middle class aspirations are catered for. Begin to laugh at the thick, racist underclass. Invent new labels for them. Call them chavs, roadmen etc. Laugh at their dress sense. Make TV programmes about them and how tasteless and thick they are. Start closing down whatever social services your country offers. Scale back employment programs; close local hospitals; create huge industrial schooling complexes. Close down factories and national industries. Allow the development of a media that sensationalises everything to sell copies. Don’t let your middle class politicians speak to the working class. When the working class voices its anger, pain and frustration, label it racist.Make the dominant social discourse one of how white middle class suburbia understands everything and how poor working class suburbia is a squalid ghetto where the only beings that live are the ones who choose to mire themselves in ignorance and sloth. ON NO ACCOUNT LISTEN TO THESE SCUMBAGS!

Deprive the untermenschen of a voice; deprive them of representatives; deprive them of the means of existence.

Then allow other people into your country. Somebody has to do the work that the untermenschen are no longer capable of doing. So get the qualified middle classes from poorer neighbouring countries and set them to work clearing your tables. Pay them what you consider fit. Any time that anyone complains about this set up, label them racist.

Now you are ready to introduce a new character. Here comes Donnie. Donnie loves the untermenschen, he says. Donnie has spent so long crapping on the untermenschen that they only recognise his arsehole – not his face. He has built a mountin of gold from crapping on the untermenschen, but they are inured to the smell of his shit. They just hear a voice crackling through the thick, brown mess. The voice says, “I see you! I hear you! I love you! I’m one of you.” When you are lost in a brown goo, you cling to whatever comes your way that doesn’t sound like a tiger. You embrace the form that carries the voice.

The voice tells you what to do. The voice crystallises your views on who the enemy is. The voice says it will find a way for you to fight back.

The horrified middle classes are calling you a racist. They don’t want to listen to you and your thick, uneducated bilge. WE CAN BEAT THEM! says the Voice. DO WHAT I SAY!

The Voice tells them to vote this way or that way.

The middle classes scream, RACIIIIIIIISSSSSTTTTSSS!

The Voice says, LISTEN TO THEM SCREAM AT YOU! HERE”S HOW WE BEAT THEM.

People vote voice. People vote leave. People flex their muscles and, for once, feel strong. They see the middle classes stumble. The middle classes are the ones who feel alienated. Doesn’t feel nice, does it motherfuckers?

The dust dies down. The winds of change have blown some of the shit away. The untermenschen gaze around, blinking. The Voice wears nice suits. The Voice doesn’t wear baseball caps. The Voice sounds like the middle classes. The Voice is wooing the middle classes. The middle classes are reluctantly doing what the Voice wants. They know the Voice is getting hoarse. The middle classes just want their comfort back.

The Voice fades. The middle classes look down at the untermenschen with disgust. They ship them back off to their ghettoes. They drink lattes in downtown fake coffeeshops. They buy cheese from artisan dairies. They find whatever way they can to spend, spend, spend.

As a UK voter who voted to remain…thank you, Chuck. This is EXACTLY what has happened in our referendum. Misinformation, Scaremongering, BIG personalities that the media love to cover…and the misguided belief that Boris Johnson and Farage are buffoons who’d never win.
I understand that there are many, many frustrated folk here who are fed up of both our government and faceless European bureaucrats telling them what to do, but they were not given the factual information they needed to make an informed decision. We will be Great Britain again, we were told, and many are celebrating that prospect. But how the heck do we stay ‘Great’, when both Scotland and Ireland want rid of us? How, when the future of our young people is now in jeopardy through the impact of major economic, educational and housing changes which are already happening and will continue to happen? How, when even on the morning that the result was announced, certain Leave campaigners reneged on their campaign promises?
‘Take control’ was what the leave campaign said…I’ve never felt more helpless. And I’m one of 48% of the UK voting public who feel the same.
God help us all.

I was one of the 48% too, Katherine. I am bitterly, disappointed. Devastated. My husband (who voted Leave) and I came near to our first row in seventeen years when we woke up and heard the news! Just gutted. Chuck – you are so right. Please don’t let Trump do a double act with Boris (they are truly the terrible twins). And this from a girl who normally votes Conservative – but if I were an American I don’t ever think I could vote Republican. I need some of those hugs you are handing out to your UK friends today!

I agree with Katherine, and thank you, Chuck for attempting to explain the truth of the campaign debacle. It is too late for “Britain” (I should really say, England), but come on, America, you need to sort this out. Otherwise all of those sci-fi apocalypse stories might well become a frightening reality, and our children will be the ones bearing the brunt of it all.

I think Cameron fucked the dog by making a national issue out of a leadership challenge. Also, his Remain campaign with their stupid scaremongering tactics made a no-brainer suddenly look like a difficult question. It was condescending. We’re not stupid, we can understand the issues. Just give us good reasons, factual reasons, based on intelligent thought.

Leave tried to sideline Farage but a lot of the emotional backlash from us Remain people, is that we are very worried that Leave = that. It doesn’t. Indeed for many working class folks, still smarting at their betrayal by Thatcher – and the poor buggers in what’s left of our steel industry, or Britain’s coal miners, who watched their entire industry dismantled and destroyed – it’s a simple case of sticking it to the man. I get why they did it but a general election would have been a better time. It’s a bit like gouging out your eyes because you don’t like the view and then wondering how you’re going to get back down the mountain.

It would also have helped if more of our young people, who wanted to stay in, had actually bothered to vote. I confess, I have only managed to find and ask 3 under 30s so far. None of them voted.

Europe is also being arsy, by saying we’ve voted and we now have to leave a.s.a.p. when it would be reasonable to negotiate this sensibly and properly and that will take time.

I voted stay, and while I feel that I understand the sentiments of Leave a bit better now, I’m still gutted.

I am a very sad and disillusioned Brit. My own county was over 60% in favour of Brexit – largely from the economically depressed areas. It was not a vote in favour of leaving the EU (most people barely know what the EU does or doesn’t do) it was a vote against austerity. Too many people believed the campaign of – not just misinformation – downright lies. (Farage has already withdrawn his statement that £350 million a week could be poured into the NHS if we brexit.) Cameron, via the referendum, has delivered us into the hands of the Tory right wingers. Gods help us if we end up with Prime Minister Boris or Gove when Cameron leaves office in October. (And, of course, somehow this all ends up being Jeremy Corbyn’s fault, because – hey – gotta plame the fubar on someone.) So I’m with you on this, Chuck: America, do not let that man Trump bamboozle you into letting him anywhere near the White House.

Voting is a lot like gardening without gloves and shovels. You have all these thorny weeds in your yard that are rooted deep. Festering yellow dandelions overtaking your hydrangea, the thing that belongs in your yard. Then, as your hands begin to bleed and sour from pulling thorny weeds and ivy barehanded someone’s dog shits in your yard and you now have no way to remove it. So there it stays, smelly, gross, decaying in your front yard until it is absorbed into the dirt leaving a dead spot on your grass.

Voting, to me, has become some kind of sick tradition we do every year. I don’t even know why I do it anymore. I don’t think there has ever been a candidate in a national general election that I wanted to vote for. Both parties have been dropping trou and plopping dooks in front of us for so long and nothing can be done about it. Every now and then a good third party guy or gal comes along and they are snubbed by the media. For once I would like to see the two “main parties” actually debate a third party. I will gladly roll around my front yard when that day comes.

So I guess my real question here is, have YOU ever succeeded in doing what you’re proposing? Exactly how? Can you give an example of this brilliant idea of listening and empathizing and outlining practical steps to change actually *working*? I mean it’s dirt easy to sit back and cavil about the liberal failure to connect with the white working class — and I agree — but what I never see is suggestions that haven’t been TRIED a zillion times already.

The brilliant idea of listening and empathising worked marvellously when the gays and lesbians stood alongside the miners in the miners’ strike. There’s a feelgood film that you can watch all about this. They did the cause of equality a very good deal as a result.

@Diarmuid — Okay, it’s actually Chris I was asking, not you, but since he hasn’t answered yet. ^^

Well, the one thing you list that I know the Dems and liberals in the US need to do, and CAN do, and just need to full-throatedly commit to, (it’s the US I’m more familiar with, I don’t know where the UK is at on this issue right now) is revitalize the labor movement. We’ve been seeing some of that starting to move. I mean I’ve been to #Fightfor15 events where you had a lot of different groups coming out in support, including BLM and LGBT groups and so on, so there’s *starting* to be some momentum there. I don’t know how much of the white working class that particular effort is hitting though — so many of the people working minimum-wage jobs these days are, well, not white. And a lot of the white poor are no longer in industries that are unionized. The unionized factory jobs a lot of them resent losing and want back are just…NOT…going to come back, no matter what the pols say. (Although I do think that pushing for advanced manufacturing/clean energy industrial jobs like Hillary’s been proposing DOES have a lot of potential.) There are also some ongoing efforts to try and unionize some non-union industries that badly need to be organized. But it’s a rough haul — the decline of unions in this country at least has been slow and ignominious, and a lot of the people who could most benefit from unionizing have been indoctrinated against it on a quasi-religious basis for many years now. Not just to think of unions as bad and anticapitalist, but also to think of unions as being appropriate only for the kinds of jobs they consider beneath them. (You know…non-white people’s jobs.)

Anyway — what I’m trying to say here is not that there’s NEVER been successful efforts. More that there’s many *more* efforts that just don’t succeed despite sustained and passionate work. So what I need to find is expertise on what EXACTLY separates the successes from the failures. I don’t need to be told that trying as opposed to not-trying makes a difference, that part is pretty obvious, at least to me. 🙂 So I frankly found that suggestion a little insulting. For me It’s more about how to make sure, or as sure as you can, that the hard work will be successful. You can only bang your head against a wall so many times before you’re going to give up, even if you really shouldn’t, and at least in this country (again, can’t speak to the UK sitch) a lot of liberals are demoralized and tired of talking themselves hoarse trying to get past the cartoon image of us that the conservatives have managed to conjure up in the states that most NEED more liberal policies.

I can’t vote, because I’ll only turn eighteen a couple of months after the election. Which is really frustrating, because I almost made the cut. I’m trying to get one of my friends to “vote for Hillary Clinton for me,” because she hates Donald Trump, but, she’s saying she’s just not going to vote. Which sucks.

Ergh, that is so frustrating. Listen, I don’t know what state you’re in, but if where you are has the Hillary campaign set up anything like it is in California, you can volunteer and end up actually bringing *many* votes in for Hillary. 🙂 In fact, some of our best volunteers are people who can’t vote in this election but who still care passionately about it — for instance, people still waiting for their citizenship application to go through.

We have a guy here who’s an LGBT activist from Tunisia, who’s applying for asylum because it’s no longer safe for him in Tunisia. :-/ He can’t vote in the election. BUT he’s volunteering his heart out and making lots of new friends in the process, and everybody agrees he’s been a valuable part of our primary win in San Francisco. (Also, he’s gotten to meet Hillary and Cory Booker on their campaign stops here and stuff. 🙂 ) In some places it’s also possible for students to volunteer to be Fellows and get class/community service credit etc. We had some awesome interns and fellows for the primary and I’ll sure we’ll get some more for the general. So if you’re interested, definitely check with your local campaign office to see what they have going in your area! 😀

I am surprised with how the votes in UK went.but i confirmed that politicians are the same world wide.they life,economize on the truth and latter on admit. its for the electorate to know the truth without being told

I am conservative. I served my country. I am not an idiot. Nor stupid. I am also not a racist. But nearly every one of you above has put one negative label after another on me and those that think like I do. I think HRC is the worst of the worst. You will tell me “its a right wing conspiracy.” It is sad to me that while you claim everyone on the right are “haters” and “racist” and we should be open to your points of view, so many of you will refuse to even listen to why we feel and think as we do. Your refusal to look and see if some of what is being offered, idea wise, from “my side” of the isle is what is wrong. Many of things above that you claim is happening about lies and misdirection comes from your side as well.

I actually have more respect for Bernie Sanders, even tho he is 180′ opposite what I politically believe, than most any of the other candidates, from all parties. He really seems to be honest with who he is, has never tried to hide what he believes, and certainly doesnt have the stench of corruption around him like HRC.

I am also not a professional writer, and I may meander a bit with the this, but those of you with the hateful vitriol that is spewing forth may want to look into the mirror and check and see if you may be part of the hate fueled and divided nature of our country, or in England too. Both side are real good at this. It does not go just one way.

I, for one, believe that elections (votes) have consequences. The “leave” side won. Good for them and learn to work with them if you lost. I will never be happy Obama won here. I think he has done such damage to our country that it will take a long time to recover. But I have had to learn to deal with it. I did not go on rants, like above. I did not claim that all on the winning side were idiots, stupid, or hate filled racists. Was I very dissapointed, yes. But elections have consequences, and you either live with them and try to get change next time or you move.

Chuck, I have liked reading many of your emails. But this time, you simply sound like one of those folks that did not like what you “did” to their fan universe. I dont recall what they called themselves, or what you may have labeled them as. They most certainly went to far with harrasment and name calling etc. You sir, very much reminded me of them with your post. You are eloquent, a professional writer, and can do better.